The Kent's Cavern 4 right maxilla (KC4) was excavated in 1927, and described byKeith, who diagnosed it as an Upper Palaeolithic modern human. In 1988 it wasdirectly dated by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), giving a radiocarbon age of30,900 ± 900 BP. In the last ten years the stratigraphic, chronological andarchaeological context of the specimen has been re-investigated, suggesting agreater antiquity for it, and further study of the fossil showed that it had beenwrongly reconstructed.

A new reconstruction of the specimen has been made and subjected to detailed studyregarding its modern human or Neanderthal affinities. Further direct dating and an ancient DNA investigation proved unsuccessful, but Bayesian analysis of a series of ultrafiltered dates on an ordered stratigraphic sequence of associated fauna places KC4 at 44.180—41.530 (95.4% prob.) cal BP. It is thus a crucial specimen in terms of the initial Upper Palaeolithic and the potential overlap of the last Neanderthals and the earliest modern humans in western Europe.

(The new reconstruction of the Kent’s Cavern maxilla by Chris Collins, PalaeontologyConservation Unit, NH)

Sorting the muddle in the middle: how many early human species inEurope?

"The early human occupants of Europe are well-characterised from theirarchaeology, but considerable debate surrounds who these people were, and howthey relate to later human populations. In this talk I will present my current viewsabout the status of Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis and Homoneanderthalensis. Homo antecessor was probably a European derivative of AsianHomo erectus, which may have gone extinct. Homo heidelbergensis was awidespread species which apparently gave rise to at least three descendentpopulations: Homo sapiens in Africa, Homo neanderthalensis in western Eurasia,and the ‘Denisovans’ in eastern Eurasia. The Atapuerca Sima de los Huesos sampleshould be assigned to Homo neanderthalensis rather than Homo heidelbergensis.Nevertheless, there is growing evidence for an overlap of Homo heidelbergensis andits putative descendants in the later Middle Pleistocene. Together with recentindications of late Pleistocene archaic-modern gene flow, these issues highlight thecomplexity of any taxonomic framework for these populations."

Chris Stringer, Department of Palaeontology, The Natural History Museum.

Advances in direct radiocarbon dating of Neanderthal and anatomically modern human (AMH) fossils and the development of archaeostratigraphic chronologies now allow refined regional models for Neanderthal–AMH coexistence. In addition, they allow us to explore the issue of late Neanderthal survival in regions of Western Eurasia located within early routes of AMH expansion such as the Caucasus. Here we report the direct radiocarbon (14C) dating of a late Neanderthal specimen from a Late Middle Paleolithic (LMP) layer in Mezmaiskaya Cave, northern Caucasus. Additionally, we provide a more accurate chronology for the timing of Neanderthal extinction in the region through a robust series of 16 ultrafiltered bone collagen radiocarbon dates from LMP layers and using Bayesian modeling to produce a boundary probability distribution function corresponding to the end of the LMP at Mezmaiskaya.

The direct date of the fossil (39,700 ± 1,100 14C BP) is in good agreement with the probability distribution function, indicating at a high level of probability that Neanderthals did not survive at Mezmaiskaya Cave after 39 ka cal BP ("calendrical" age in kiloannum before present, based on IntCal09 calibration curve). This challenges previous claims for late Neanderthal survival in the northern Caucasus. We see striking and largely synchronous chronometric similarities between the Bayesian age modeling for the end of the LMP at Mezmaiskaya and chronometric data from Ortvale Klde for the end of the LMP in the southern Caucasus. Our results confirm the lack of reliably dated Neanderthal fossils younger than ∼40 ka cal BP in any other region of Western Eurasia, including the Caucasus.

A consideration of the morphological aspects of the earliest modern humans in Europe (more than ≈33,000 B.P.) and the subsequent Gravettian human remains indicates that they possess an anatomical pattern congruent with the autapomorphic (derived) morphology of the earliest (Middle Paleolithic) African modern humans. However, they exhibit a variable suite of features that are either distinctive Neandertal traits and/or plesiomorphic (ancestral) aspects that had been lost among the African Middle Paleolithic modern humans.

These features include aspects of neurocranial shape, basicranial external morphology, mandibular ramal and symphyseal form, dental morphology and size, and anteroposterior dental proportions, as well as aspects of the clavicles, scapulae, metacarpals, and appendicular proportions.

The farther that human populations live from the equator, the bigger their brains, according to a new study by Oxford University. But it turns out that this is not because they are smarter, but because they need bigger vision areas in the brain to cope with the low light levels experienced at high latitudes.

Scientists have found that people living in countries with dull, grey, cloudy skies and long winters have evolved bigger eyes and brains so they can visually process what they see, reports the journal Biology Letters.

Lead author Eiluned Pearce, from the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology in the School of Anthropology, said: ‘As you move away from the equator, there's less and less light available, so humans have had to evolve bigger and bigger eyes. Their brains also need to be bigger to deal with the extra visual input. Having bigger brains doesn't mean that higher latitude humans are smarter, it just means they need bigger brains to be able to see well where they live.’

That the explanation is the need to compensate for low light levels at high latitudes is indicated by the fact that actual visual sharpness measured under natural daylight conditions is constant across latitudes, suggesting that the visual processing system has adapted to ambient light conditions as human populations have moved across the globe.

The study takes into account a number of potentially confounding effects, including the effect of phylogeny (the evolutionary links between different lineages of modern humans), the fact that humans living in the higher latitudes are physically bigger overall, and the possibility that eye socket volume was linked to cold weather (and the need to have more fat around the eyeball by way of insulation).

The skulls used in the study were from the indigenous populations of England, Australia, Canary Islands, China, France, India, Kenya, Micronesia, Scandinavia, Somalia, Uganda and the United States. From measuring the brain cavity, the research suggests that the biggest brains belonged to populations who lived in Scandinavia with the smallest being Micronesians.

Ambient light levels influence visual system size in birds and primates. Here, we argue that the same is true for humans. Light levels, in terms of both the amount of light hitting the Earth's surface and day length, decrease with increasing latitude. We demonstrate a significant positive relationship between absolute latitude and human orbital volume, an index of eyeball size.

Owing to tight scaling between visual system components, this will translate into enlarged visual cortices at higher latitudes. We also show that visual acuity measured under full-daylight conditions is constant across latitudes, indicating that selection for larger visual systems has mitigated the effect of reduced ambient light levels. This provides, to our knowledge, the first support that light levels drive intraspecific variation in visual system size in the human population.

Recent discovery of a stylized reindeer engraving in a South Wales by Dr George Nash from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, now has been scientifically dated. The date of the flowstone that covers the head of the reindeer is 12,572 +/- 659 years Before Present, and the rock-art below may be much earlier. It is now confirmed that the carved reindeer is one of Britain's earliest examples of engraved figurative rock art.

Dr Nash discovered the faint engraving while visiting the Gower Peninsula caves near Swansea in September 2010 with students and members of the Clifton Antiquarian Club. "This engraving appears to have made by an artist using a flint point held in his or her right hand onto a limestone panel covered with flowstone. The panel forms part of a very tight niche at the back of the cave," Dr Nash said.

The discovery has being officially verified by experts from Oxford and Durham universities and the National Museum of Wales. The project team that includes Dr Peter van Calsteren and Dr Louise Thomas from the Open University, and Dr Mike Simms from the National Museums Northern Ireland is being financially supported by Cadw and logistically administered by the National Museum Wales.

Comparison of the results against other recently dated sites in other parts of Europe suggests the Early Aurignacian levels are earlier than other sites in the south of France and Italy, but not as early as recently dated sites which suggest a pre-Aurignacian dispersal of modern humans to Italy by ∼45000 cal BP. [...]

The new dates fail to refute the Kulturpumpe model and suggest that Swabian Jura is a region that contributed significantly to the evolution of symbolic behaviour as indicated by early evidence for figurative art, music and mythical imagery.

Dr George Nash, an archaeology lecturer at Bristol University and consultant employed at SLR Consulting in Shrewsbury, discovered the engraving while undertaking field work in 2010. "This is a site of huge international importance, and research by a team of specialists has dated the paintings as being 12,572 years old, plus or minus 600 years. At that time this area of Wales experienced summers of -10Â°C and we know there was a huge ice sheet just four or five kilometres north of the cave," said Dr Nash. "It's not only the oldest rock art ever found in the UK but, until a few years ago, history books would have told you that human beings could not have survived here in such severe conditions, clearly now this is not the case. This evidence proves that they could, and did," he added.

Dr Nash also said: "We've also been incredibly lucky at this site because you can only date engravings like this if something overlies them such as flowstone (stalagmite). For some reason, and by complete coincidence, the person who engraved this art over 12,000 years ago did so on a piece of rock where a flowstone later grew over it, which is the only reason we could work out its history."

Using carbon dating, the researchers determined that both the engraved ceiling, which includes depictions of animals and geometric forms, and the other artifacts found on the living surface below were approximately 37,000 years old.

"This art appears to be slightly older than the famous paintings from the Grotte Chauvet in southeastern France," explained White, referring to the cave paintings discovered in 1994.

"But unlike the Chauvet paintings and engravings, which are deep underground and away from living areas, the engravings and paintings at Castanet are directly associated with everyday life, given their proximity to tools, fireplaces, bone and antler tool production, and ornament workshops."

He added that this discovery, combined with others of approximately the same time period in southern Germany, northern Italy, and southeastern France, raises new questions about the evolutionary and adaptive significance of art and other forms of graphic representation in the lives of modern human populations.

The uranium tests, like previous radiocarbon tests, showed that there was wide variation in the age of the paintings. The El Castillo paintings yielded a time frame stretching from 22,600 years ago all the way back to at least 40,800 years ago. That farthest-back age is particularly telling. Previously, archaeologists had thought the paintings went back to about 38,000 years. The new tests push the age back to near the time when modern humans were first thought to have inhabited the area, around 42,000 years ago.

Pike said that raises three scenarios: El Castillo's modern humans might have developed their cave-painting skills during their migration out of Africa, and put it to use when they arrived in Europe. After all, communities of Homo sapiens who lived in Africa and the Near East showed evidence of artistic behavior going back as far as 75,000 to 100,000 years. Another possibility is that humans started painting cave walls soon after their arrival in Europe — perhaps as the result of cultural competition with the native Neanderthals, who are known to have inhabited the region as far back as 250,000 years ago. Or the Neanderthals themselves could have created the first paintings, and Homo sapiens picked up the artistic habit while Homo neanderthalensis faded away.

Re-Examining the "Out of Africa" Theory and the Origin of Europeoids (Caucasoids) in Light of DNA Genealogy

"This paper 1) sets forth a timeframe for the origin of Europeoids (Caucasoids); 2) identifies their position among all haplogroups (tribes) known today on the haplogroup tree; and 3) offers evidence to re-examine the validity of the “Out of Africa” concept.”

[...]

“The concept was based primarily on the premise that Africa possesses the highest variability, or variance, of the human DNA and its segments. Set apart, it is not a strong argument because a mix of different DNA lineages also results in a high variability and, as we show below, it is largely what occurs in Africa. Moreover, a genomic gap exists between some Africans and non-Africans, which has also been interpreted as an argument that the latter descended from Afri- cans. A more plausible interpretation might have been that both current Africans and non-Africans descended separately from a more ancient common ancestor, thus forming a proverbial fork.A region where this downstream common ancestor arose would not necessarily be in Africa. In fact, it was never proven that he lived in Africa.”

"It was found that African haplogroup A (originated 132,000 ± 12,000 years before present) is very remote time-wise from all other haplogroups, which have a separate common ancestor, named β-haplogroup, and originated 64,000 ± 6000 ybp. It includes a family of Europeoid (Caucasoid) haplogroups from F through T that originated 58,000 ± 5000 ybp. A downstream common ancestor for haplogroup A and β-haplogroup, coined the α-haplogroup emerged 160,000 ± 12,000 ybp.

A territorial origin of haplogroups α- and β-remains unknown; however, the most likely origin for each of them is a vast triangle stretched from Central Europe in the west through the Russian Plain to the east and to Levant to the south.

“A critical datapoint has emerged that disproves the “Out of Africa” concept; specifically, recent data shows that non-Afri- can people have neither M91, P97, M31, P82, M23, M114, P262, M32, M59, P289, P291, P102, M13, M171, M118 (haplogroup A and its subclades SNPs), nor M60, M181, P90 (haplogroup B SNPs) in their Y-chromosomes. In fact, according to the data obtained from the “Walk Through the Y” (chromosome) international project conducted by Family Tree DNA (Texas and Arizona) [see Appendix] not one non-African participant out of more than 400 individuals in the Project tested positive to any of thirteen “African” sub- clades of haplogroup A…”

“A higher variance of the DNA in Africa, which was a cornerstone of the “Out of Africa” theory, is explained by Figure 3, in which haplogroup A has been evolving (mutation-wise) for 132,000 years, while the non-European haplogroups are much younger. Hence, there is a lower variability in the latter. The same is related to language variability, which has also been used as an argument of the African origin of non-Africans. We believe that those arguments upon which the “Out of Africa” theory was based were, in fact, conjectural, incomplete and not actually data-driven. Therefore, we are left holding the question of the origin of Homo sapiens.”

"A challenge in detecting signals of gene flow between Neandertals and modern human ancestors," state the study authors in the report, "is that the two groups share common ancestors within the last 500,000 years, which is no deeper than the nuclear DNA sequence variation within present-day humans. Thus, even if no gene flow occurred, in many segments of the genome, Neandertals are expected to be more closely related to some present-day humans than they are to each other."

John Hawks, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, reports the results of a study of the comparison of East Asian region samples (Japanese, Han Chinese in Beijing, and Han Chinese originating in South China) with European region samples (Tuscans, British, Finn, CEU, and Spanish) taken from the 1000 Genomes Project in his weblog entitled The Malapa Soft Tissue Project. Here he concludes that "the Europeans average a bit more Neandertal than Asians", suggesting that "Europeans may have mixed with Neandertals as they moved into Europe, constituting a second process of population mixture beyond that shared by European and Asian ancestors". [2] More interesting still were the differences detected among the samples within each of the two regions. Within the East Asian region, the North China population was found to have more Neandertal indicators than the South China, and within the European region, the southern populations more than the northern, with the Tuscans having "the highest level of Neandertal similarity of any of the 1000 Genomes Project samples". [2] Hawks relates the results of research on African populations, as well, which also show variability. He points to the Yoruba people, a West African population, having significantly more Neandertal genome similarity than the Luhya, an East African population. "We now know from examination of genetic variation within Africa today," states Hawks about the possible implications, "that some of today's diversity can be traced to ancient population structure in Middle Pleistocene African populations. For example, Neandertals could be more closely related to some African populations than others today because Neandertals actually exchanged genes with some ancient African populations.